“God is NOT mother!”

Check out the latest liberal outrage that has caused some orthodox clergy in Michigan to work themselves into a lather:

DETROIT, MI (3/20/2006)–A billboard erected by the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan which read; “My God is Mother” and “I am an Episcopalian” with a picture of a woman reading a bible, and the diocesan website address, so incensed a group of orthodox clergy that the diocese was forced to bring it down.

The billboard had been erected less than a mile from St. John’s, an orthodox parish in Detroit on I-75 north, as a part of a slick ad campaign derived from the graphically interesting but theologically awful flashplay intro on the diocesan website www.edomi.org.

The billboard, by its appearance and content so outraged Fr. Steven J. Kelly, SSC, rector of St. John’s that he contacted diocesan headquarters and complained bitterly to the bishop. “God is NOT mother!” he told Bishop Wendell N. Gibbs Jr. 

[Ed.:  Fr. Kelly’s insistent statement brings to mind my Favorite Theological Question # 1:  “How exactly do you know that?”]

One of the comments reproduces a funny parody hymn that I hadn’t seen before.

On the merits, I don’t see what’s so offensive about the billboard.  The notion of God as mother apparently goes back at least as far as Julian of Norwich.  If we take Genesis 1.27 at face value, God created mankind in his own image, both male and female, and no less than Isaiah speaks of God in maternal terms (66.12-13).

According to my (very orthodox) rector, some non-believers have trouble accepting the idea of God because they think of God as a father but they had problems with their own fathers.  If thinking of God as mother in addition to father helps these folks to relate to God, I don’t understand why that isn’t a good thing.

In any case, God is what he is.  Our calling him Father (or Mother, or whatever) doesn’t mean he can’t have other attributes too.